Can start-up Hopping Chef corner a slice of the fine dining market?

When Shrikant Manjrekar wanted to throw a ‘special party’ last month, he was in a fix. Promoted to head the Mumbai branch of an American MNC in June, Manjrekar was keen to host the bash at a five-star hotel, but that would have meant partying in a ‘formal ambiance.’ Organising the show at home, on the other hand, would have deprived his fifty-odd guests of the dishes prepared by high-quality chefs. Enter Hopping Chef. A celebrated chef with stints at Marriott and Starwood, and who has hosted popular food shows like Master Chef India, was roped in to dish out a 13-course meal designed around a menu suggested by Manjrekar. “The food was even better than what I would have got at luxury hotels,” he grins, adding that it didn’t pinch at all to foot a bill of `20,000 per head. “Absolutely worth it,” says Manjrekar.

Started in January 2015 in Mumbai with 10 chefs, the bespoke dining startup now boasts of 60 chefs including the likes of Ajay Chopra, Pankaj Raut, Shantanu Gupte and Michael Swamy. It is set to roll out ‘Hop Box’, a chef-led multi-cuisine ready-to-eat meal box. Hopping Chef, reckons Shaival Chandra, founder of Gritty Foods that owns the food startup, was born out of a need to have the best world cuisine created by chefs, right inside homes. The process is simple. One logs on to the web- site, picks up the cuisine and chef that one prefers.

“Every meal at Hopping Chef is very special and 100% tailor-made,” claims Chandra, adding that in case of a private dining or bespoke meal experience, the chef’s visit and prepare food at homes. From Oriental and Italian to South American and Japanese, Hopping Chef has the bandwidth to customise a meal for two, or curate a large menu for a party of 15,000. “We’ve done romantic dinners, house warming parties, game-viewing parties, personal celebrations and official lunches,” says Chandra, who acquired Falafels, a Lebanese Haus, in April this year, and was the official food partner of the recently-concluded India concert by Justin Bieber.

Hopping Chef serves 2,000 meals every day in the B2B space through its central kitchens in Mumbai and Bengaluru. In the B2C space, where the food is cooked in- side the house of a consumer, it does over 12 events every month as customisation of food takes time. For Hop Box, Hopping Chef plans to use recipe banks of all its chefs, curated and created especially for Gritty Foods. Highly trained chef executives in the central kitchen will use these recipes to create the meals. Expansion plans are not on the platter for the time being. “We operate in Mumbai and Bengaluru only,” he says. The startup would prefer consolidating its position in these two cities.

The ‘stay-at-home’ economy, reckon food experts, has arrived in India. “Like it or not, this is the fastest growing trend in the country,” says Jaspal Sabharwal, a food and private equity industry veteran. The scale being unleashed by the pre-cooked food delivery model is unprecedented, with delivery exceeding 10%-12% of the total fast food market. Sabharwal, however, sounds a word of caution. The meal-kit and chef-interface based food mod- els are at a nascent stage. While companies engaged in this segment are trying to tap the latent demand, they will be hugely valuable if they are able to achieve a reasonable scale. “It will be interesting to see how these startups go about building their economic moat,” he adds.

Chandra, for his part, is aware of the easiest food trap: reckless expansion. “The thumb rule is to chew, and not swallow,” he says, explaining the conscious move to not expand beyond Mumbai and Bangalore since inception. The food business is a constantly changing landscape that requires immense focus. “We determined our focus long ago, and that has helped us thrive,” he says. While conceding that food tech has seen death of a slew of startups over the last few years, Chandra maintains that there is a lesson to be learnt. “Either they lost focus or their team faltered,” he says. The biggest challenge, he re- calls, when Hopping Chef started was to set up a state-of-the-art kitchen as per ISO and HCAAP guidelines, and investing heavily in infrastructure and training. “It helped us grow faster, deliver better and be far more efficient than rivals,” he says, adding that now there are new challenges. The biggest would be, he con- tends, to keep the spotlight firmly on chefs. “Abroad, chefs are at the heart of every meal and brand,” says Chandra. Hope the startup keeps its flock of chefs together so that they don’t hop from his ship!